Our Forest, Your Ecosystem, Their Timber: Communities, Conservation, and the State in Community-Based Forest Management

Our Forest, Your Ecosystem, Their Timber

Nicholas K. Menzies

Our Forest, Your Ecosystem, Their Timber

Communities, Conservation, and the State in Community-Based Forest Management

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York    Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51023-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Menzies, Nicholas K.

Our forest, your ecosystem, their timber : communities, conservation, and the state in community-based forest management / Nicholas K. Menzies.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-231-13692-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-231-13692-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Community forestry—Case studies. 2. Forest management—Case studies. 3. Forest policy—Case studies. I. Title.

SD561.M46    2007

333.75—dc22

        2006018948

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Designed by Lisa Hamm

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

As we progressively understood the causes of environmental degradation, we saw the need for good governance. Indeed, the state of any country’s environment is a reflection of the kind of governance in place, and without good governance there can be no peace.

—WANGARI MAATHAI, NOBEL LECTURE, 2004

Contents

Acknowledgments

1.    Introduction

2.    Naidu Village, Yunnan Province, China

3.    Jozani Forest, Ngezi Forest, and Misali Island, Zanzibar

4.    The Várzea Forests of Mazagão, Amapá State, Brazil

5.    Kangra Valley, Himachal Pradesh, India

6.    The Community Narrative of Forest Loss and Degradation

7.    Invoking the Community

8.    The Capacity to Manage

9.    Negotiating Partnerships: Whose Voice Is Loudest?

10.  Governance and Empowerment

11.  Conclusions

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

I HAD no idea when I arrived three years ago in California from East Africa what I was embarking on. My plan was to write some papers on community forestry for publication in relevant journals and professional publications. As I worked, I found the issues proliferating, while at the same time they surfaced and resurfaced in different places and guises but were still recognizably the same issues. The papers that I had expected to write turned into several thematic papers, possibly to be included in an edited volume. These in turn evolved into this one book, still focused on current issues in community forestry but reflecting at the same time on past trajectories to the present and on where community-based forest management might find its place in a future, wider picture of forests and communities.

In the process of turning a vast topic into something manageable, I have had to make difficult choices about what to include and what to leave out. Perhaps the most difficult decision was to concentrate this analysis on places where communities and state resource management agencies are cautiously moving toward a new dispensation, which includes communities as forest managers, in contrast to past policies of exclusion. Inevitably, this decision means that there is little here about the rich legacy of indigenous and local forest management systems or forest management systems devised and implemented by communities themselves on their own land. For centuries, communities from New England to Switzerland to Borneo and countless other places have cared for and maintained forestland to provide for their material needs and to enrich their cultures and spiritual lives. Much still needs to be written about these communities and their forests, but it will have to wait for another opportunity. In this book, I have chosen to look at how communities, states, civil society, and commercial interests are inching their way to accommodations over the utilization of land that they variously perceive as being forest, endangered and vulnerable ecosystems, or valuable timber resources.

I have been able to work on this book thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank my former colleagues in Ford Foundation offices around the world who had enough confidence in me to support my idea of trying to capture at least some of what has been happening over the last twenty or thirty years in community forestry. I have benefited from their trust and from many opportunities to talk and exchange ideas with a remarkable group of peers.

The lengthy reference list at the end of this book testifies to the work of many professionals and scholars who have been involved in the emergence of community-based forest management and in analyzing what it means both for communities and for forests. I am indebted to all who have carried out the case studies, theory-building, and syntheses that have shaped the field and without which I would not have been able to even start this study.

I have built this book on four snapshots of communities managing forests and on four longer stories from around the world. Many dedicated community leaders, researchers, and representatives of government agencies and NGOs made my own visits to communities described here easier and more productive than they would otherwise have been. A far from exhaustive list of those who assisted me must include Chief Edwin Ogar of Ekuri, Nigeria; Louis Lesage of the Conseil de la Nation Huronne-Wendat in Québec; Leticia Merino-Pérez and David Bray in Oaxaca, Mexico; He Jun and Xu Jianchu of CBIK in Kunming, China; Thabit Masoud and the staff of DCCFF and of CARE International in Zanzibar; Amália’s family in Mazagão and Miguel Pinedo-Vazquez in New York; and Rajeev Ahal, Vasant Saberwal, Mark Baker, Kim Berry, and members of the forest cooperatives in the Kangra valley. In other places that did not become snapshots or stories in the book but that were essential to my thinking about communities and forests, I would particularly like to thank Harry May and the staff of the Surplus People Project in Namaqualand, South Africa; Marilyn Hoskins, formerly of FAO; Lin Ostrom and members of the IFRI network, especially in Uganda and Kenya; and John Watkin, formerly of the African Conservation Centre in Nairobi. Thanks also to the very many people who are not listed here by name but who have helped me throughout this project.

During the year and a half that it took me to write this text, I had the unique pleasure and honor to be part of a book group at Berkeley with Louise Fortmann and Nancy Peluso, who were working on their own books at the same time. Time after time, they reminded me that even if I thought I knew what I was trying to say, I had not communicated my meaning with sufficient clarity. They helped me to rethink, rewrite, and look afresh at what others have already worked on and written. I can only hope in return that they have both found at least a little value in having me in the group with them.

Finally, while I embarked on this book alone, I could not possibly have stayed with it and completed it without the strength and support of my wife and closest companion, Melinda. She kept me going even on those days when I struggled to write just one or two sentences, knowing that I would probably have to erase them the next day because they were not quite right. Without her, I could not have done it.

1

Introduction

A GLOBAL review of forest ownership published in 2002 estimated that approximately 11 percent of all the world’s forested land is under some form of community-based ownership (White and Martin 2002). In the eighteen developing countries in a sample of the top twenty-four of thirty forested countries, the same survey found an even higher total of 22 percent of land to be under community ownership. The statistics are impressive, but they reduce to simple numbers the rich diversity of experience and the many pathways that have brought communities to a point at which they are accorded the recognition that is their due as important players in the stewardship of the world’s forests. Four brief snapshots of different communities managing forests will illustrate the diversity of people, practices, and institutions behind the statistics:

•   In 1989 one Chinantec and three Zapotec communities in the Juarez Oaxaca mountains of central Mexico formed the Unión Zapoteca-Chinanteca (UZACHI) after years of struggle to regain control over their collectively owned forest, where a timber company had been operating under a twenty-five-year concession from the central government. UZACHI now manages more than 26,000 hectares of forestland remarkable for its high level of biodiversity. The union operates a sawmill, processing logs from its land and earning income from the timber, which is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as sustainably produced. It is also experimenting with other forest activities, such as orchid cultivation and harvesting and cultivating mushrooms, including the export of matsutake mushrooms to Japan (Anon. 2000).

•   The six thousand residents of the villages of Old and New Ekuri in Nigeria’s Cross River State resisted a state forestry department decision in the early 1990s to sell permits to commercial logging companies to harvest timber from communally owned village land. In the early 1990s, with assistance from local NGOs and international donors, the two villages collaborated with the nearby Cross River National Park to conduct their own forest inventory and develop a management plan with permanent transects monitoring forest condition. The state forestry authorities have now accepted the plan, ensuring that the two communities will control how the forest is used in the future (Anon. 1999).¹

•   In 1897 the Huron-Wendat people of Canada’s Québec Province lost their hunting and fishing rights to an extensive area of forest with the creation of the Réserve Faunique des Laurentides—a forest reserve where the province currently grants twenty-five-year concessions to commercial timber companies. By the 1980s the Huron-Wendat concluded that their survival as a First Nation depended on the restoration of their rights and on developing forestry-based employment opportunities. In 1987 they entered into negotiations with the province and with Gestofor, the company that held the concession to the Tourilli area of the reserve. The Huron-Wendat Nation now co-manages a 400-square-kilometer area with the province and has an agreement with Gestofor for the remaining years of its current concession and expects to negotiate an expanded co-management agreement over a larger area during the period of the next concession.²

•   Lakeview is a small community in eastern Oregon that grew around a timber mill processing logs from the Fremont-Winnema National Forest. In 1996 the U.S. Forest Service halted logging in the area in response to lawsuits from environmental groups concerned about the threat to wildlife habitat. Faced with the likely closure of the mill, the citizens of Lakeview invited environmentalists, scientists, and Forest Service officials to join them in an effort to break through the deadlock of entrenched interests and to come to a consensus on a way forward. By 2001 the Forest Service approved a management plan devised by what had become known as the Lakeview Stewardship Group. The plan’s goal is the restoration of the forest, allowing logging to continue, with scientists monitoring forestry activity for its environmental impacts and with contractors from the community receiving preference for work in the area. The stewardship group is now preparing a longer-term management plan, and the timber mill continues to operate and to employ local people (Hanscom 2004).

PLATE 1. Dancers at New Ekuri village welcome visitors to a celebration of the community’s forest.

PHOTO: AUTHOR

These four sketches portray different people and places: an association of indigenous communities in Mexico, forest villages under the authority of traditional rulers in West Africa, one of Canada’s First Nations looking to a revitalized cultural and economic future, and a small economically threatened rural community in the United States. In each of these places, people are acting together and following distinctive strategies to assert their claims in forests over which they feel they have lost control in the course of the last century or more. They and many others around the world are taking steps to protect their forests in order to secure long-term benefits from the products and services that flow from the forests in which they live. While the differences between them are as important as the similarities, they are all representative of what has come to be known as community-based forest management (CBFM).³

The four snapshots give a glimpse of the many histories that have led to communities becoming forest managers and of the range of activities that they are involved in. Each of the next four chapters tells a longer and more detailed story of people struggling to secure their interests in forests on which they depend or of a community that is becoming an active player in caring for forests. The stories—from China, Zanzibar, Brazil, and India—are each unique in their ecological setting, their history and politics, and the way the communities live with the forest. The four snapshots and these four stories all share a common narrative, however, which highlights questions about how and why CBFM has entered the agenda of both conservation and development, how communities face the challenges of managing forests, and the difficult process of negotiating partnerships between communities and others claiming an interest in forest resources.

Chapters 6–10 take up these questions to consider them in the light of a growing body of experience from around the world in order to situate CBFM in the context of the different expectations converging on forests and to consider where it fits in the repertoire of possible different management regimes in forests.

Forest management in any one location brings together a constellation of people and institutions whose differences may overwhelm their common interest in the forest. Actors claiming a stake in the present and future condition of forests include governments, the private sector, communities living in or near the forest, and other interested parties such as urban environmental and recreational organizations or seasonal users such as nomadic pastoralists. In the past, governments and state resource management agencies have declared a public interest in the forest and regulated all uses, often favoring industrial and commercial interests to the detriment of local people. CBFM breaks with this exclusionary pattern to include forest communities both in managing the forest and in benefiting from at least a share of the income or services flowing from management. After twenty or more years of experimentation, forest communities and their partners are counting the costs and the benefits of participating in CBFM. This book examines the challenges they face in reconciling the different local, national, and global interests in forests and considers the present and future roles of CBFM in the sustained use and conservation of forests around the world.

Conservation and Utilization of Forest Resources

Historically, humans have continually modified their habitat, usually with forests and woodlands giving way to agriculture, livestock grazing, and urbanization. Changing patterns of subsistence and livelihoods make some degree of change in land use inevitable and acceptable in the interests of social progress. Nevertheless, from earliest times, philosophers and other observers of changing landscapes distinguished between necessary utilization of natural resources and abusive exploitation and degradation of the environment, conceptualizing conservation in the context of use. The sacred texts of Hinduism distinguished three kinds of forest: Mahāvana, Tapovana, and Śrīvana. Mahāvana were untouched forests, the abode of the gods. Tapovana were accessible to humans, places of spiritual sustenance and retreat that provided fruit and fodder. And Śrīvana were primarily sources of sustenance for humans and could be natural or cultivated forests (Banwari 1992:31–40). Over two thousand years ago the Chinese philosopher Mencius⁴ formulated what has become a famous statement of the rationale for wise stewardship—as opposed to destructive exploitation—of forests, fisheries, and wildlife:

If the seasons of husbandry be not interfered with, the grain will be more than can be eaten. If close nets are not allowed to enter the pools and ponds, the fishes and turtles will be more than can be consumed. If the axes and bills enter the hills and forests only at the proper time, the wood will be more than can be used.

—MENG-TZU, LIANG HUI WANG 1.1.3.3 (TRANSLATED IN LEGGE 1960:130)

At almost the same time that the teachings of Mencius were being compiled in China, Plato drew a link between deforestation and soil erosion in Greece. Telling a story that has been retold in countless adaptations to other times and places, he contrasted a mythical ancient era of plenty to the hardships that farmers of his time endured to extract harvests from soils exhausted by deforestation and soil erosion (Glacken 1967:121).

By the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America, observers recognized a relationship between environmental disasters such as floods or drought and the exploitation of forests for fuel and timber to feed the new industries, calling for state intervention to control the use of forests (Marsh 1864). More recent scholarship has mapped the webs of relationships that tied states to the very interests that consumed the timber and other products from the forests and described the political dynamics that drove the demarcation, allocation, and disposal of the forest estate. During the twentieth century, in particular, forest clearance for conversion to agricultural or urban uses, large-scale commercial timber harvesting in concessions allocated to the politically powerful at rates well below economic values, and colonization schemes to bring strategic border areas under central government control have been just some of the many actions that have contributed to continuing losses of forested land (Barraclough and Ghimire 1996; Geist and Lambin 2001; Hecht and Cockburn 1989; Kaimowitz 2003; Xu et al. 1999).

States have intervened to assert control over the forest estate, claiming that only the state is able to engage in scientific, long-term management of a resource whose environmental services and economic benefits extend well beyond the area immediately under the control of forest communities (Fernow 1913). The model of forest management that state forest agencies and the forestry profession adopted has involved the manipulation of blocks of forestland to meet a planned objective, usually the production of wood or fiber, over a period of time measured in decades or more. Management objectives were determined by a professionalized institution responsible for planning, making decisions, and implementing the plan; and forests were legally designated areas of land owned by an individual or a clearly identified single legal property owner (which was often the state).

Assuming a public interest in forest products and services extending beyond the limits of the forest itself, state authorities have regulated access to and utilization of forest resources. They have demarcated boundaries to bring into existence an administrative category of land known as forest, created agencies to implement preferred management regimes on that land, and policed the forests to exclude and punish offenders against the declared public interest. Peluso and Vandergeest have described how colonial state administrations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries invented the political forest… that was either demarcated by the state for permanent reservation or… that was claimed by the state and Customary Rights, which in many cases led to a racialization of the landscape (2001:801). In partitioning the landscape between forest and other land uses, states divided the rural population into categories of legal and illegal residents, usually conforming to ethnic and cultural stereotypes of (legally) settled agrarian people and (illegal) squatters—mobile nomadic forest dwellers persisting in their customary way of life.

While Peluso and Vandergeest based their genealogies of the political forest on the histories of three southeast Asian countries, the story of government demarcation and control of forested lands was common to most colonized countries (Anderson and Grove 1987; Ghai 1991:13–14; Sivaramakrishnan 1999), nominally independent countries such as China, and other states in formation such as the United States, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries (Gaunitz 1984:137–44). The dominant pattern of government intervention has been one of increasing central control over forest resources, the denial of access to forest resources by groups that have traditionally or historically depended on them, and control over trade in (and thus the ability to benefit from) forest species and products (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001:768).

In practice, the record of state management of forest resources in the public interest is mixed. As a strategy for furthering the economic development of rural areas, large-scale forest management for timber production has been shown to be subject to severe cycles of expansion and collapse. The timber economy has most often left a legacy of boom and bust—often due to exhaustion of commercially accessible trees to harvest—with short-term gains undermined by the economic and social collapse of forest communities (Cook 1995; Lee, Field, and Burch 1990; Marchak 1983; Pinedo-Vasquez et al. 2001).

In countries with indigenous populations, resource management agencies have purportedly acted on behalf of native peoples, while they have often left a legacy of impoverishment and cultural deprivation instead. Even Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service who was otherwise a strong advocate of scientific management of forests by a federal agency, was shocked at the fraud and mismanagement that characterized the administration of Native American forests by the then Indian Office of the Department of the Interior (precursor of the present Bureau of Indian Affairs). Looking back to the early years of the twentieth century, he wrote in his autobiography that no one in the Indian Office, or on the ground was capable of handling these forests, and the result was what you might expect (Pinchot 1947:411–12; C. Miller 2000). In more modern times, countries as diverse as South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, and Brazil are still wrestling with the social, cultural, and economic deprivation that has been the legacy of policies centered on state claims to natural resources that privilege specific racial groups.

Globally, there has been little evidence of improved forest condition in environmental terms—on the contrary, the last century has witnessed continuing and extensive losses of forest cover. During the second half of the twentieth century, in particular, the data indicate that forest cover was decreasing dramatically, often related to national policies favoring agricultural development (Repetto and Gillis 1988; Hecht and Cockburn 1989) or to the allocation by government agencies of forest concessions to state or privately owned industrial interests and the lack of monitoring of harvesting and regeneration (Bryant, Nielsen, and Tangley 1997; Richards and Tucker 1988; Tucker and Richards 1983; Weiss 2001). An oral history told by an elderly man in a village near Yongning in Yunnan Province of the forests surrounding Lugu Lake on the border between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in southwestern China tells not only of the effects on local people of the loss of access to resources claimed by a succession of state agencies, but also of the environmentally devastating consequences of their mismanagement:

When I was about twelve years old, there were a lot of fish in the lake and we wove cloth for our clothing from hemp.

During the 1940s this area was mostly forested. The village chiefs prohibited cutting trees. There were so many tigers that we had to blow horns to frighten them away when we went into the forest.

In the 1950s we began to open up some fields for agriculture along the lake.

In the 1960s the government set up a fish-processing factory. The army came and used hand grenades to get fish out of the water. Then they tried to introduce fingerlings into the lake to increase the numbers of fish again, but they put in the wrong species, and the new fish ate all the eggs of the native fish.

Later on, the Sichuan government built a small hydropower dam where the river comes out of the lake, and no more fingerlings could come into the lake. So now we hardly have any fish.

In the late 1960s and into the 1970s the provincial department of forest industries came and harvested nearly all the trees around the lake. It was officially organized and people were brought in from Sichuan and Yunnan to harvest. Sometimes they used explosives to clear the roads.

In 1983 during the agricultural reforms, we were allocated land including freehold land. But now we need permits to cut any wood. Later on, that land was put into the conservation area and now we are not allowed to cut anything.

—AUTHOR’S FIELD NOTES, NOVEMBER 1992

More alarmingly, tensions between forest management agencies, the commercial forest products sector, environmental activists, and communities surrounding the forests appeared to be increasing. National parks and other protected areas around the world reported increasing encroachment and poaching. Popular movements such as the Chipko movement in India were taking direct action to prevent commercial enterprises from harvesting timber on land that communities considered to be theirs and a source of products vital to their own well-being (Guha 1990; Rangan 2000). In Thailand, Buddhist monks ordained trees in timber concessions to protect them (Darlington 1997, 1998). Meanwhile, in some wealthier industrialized countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, activist groups such as Earth First! or Greenpeace engaged in controversial and well-publicized acts of civil disobedience to press their demands for more stringent protection of forests. Through peaceful acts such as the two years that Julia Butterfly spent perched on a platform in a tree to protect a grove of old-growth redwood trees in California (San Francisco Examiner 1999) and more confrontational blockades to prevent logging at Clayoquot Sound in Canada (Toronto Globe and Mail 1993; Environment News Service 1999) or in Tasmania and New South Wales in Australia (Sidney Morning Herald 1998), organized, vocal groups signaled their rejection of forest policies that they claimed were determined by government agencies and commercial interests in disregard of the public interest. In less dramatic but equally determined ways, public pressure was growing in the form of legal appeals challenging state forest management agencies to reconsider their policies and to reorient them from commercial timber production to management strategies more respectful of local communities’ interests and conservation values (Baker and Kusel 2003:55–77).

An Invitation to Forest Communities

By the 1970s some professionals working on forest management in developing countries began to question the effectiveness of the conventional model of management in plantations and enclosed, protected areas of forest. Faced with strong evidence that existing regimes of state-administered forest management were not realizing their own mandates, some foresters, representatives of international aid agencies, and researchers began to question the traditional orientation of forest policies and of the profession toward commercial exploitation, particularly of timber. Developing countries where the scale and intensity of both conflict and forest loss were perhaps most acute were the site of intense questioning of established practices and of tentative moves to open the closed preserve of forestry to those who had been excluded.

In the 1970s Jack Westoby, a New Zealand forester nearing the end of his career with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), was among the most vocal of these critics, urging in his reports and public addresses that forestry should serve the people. In 1978, as the guest speaker at the Eighth World Forestry Congress in Jakarta, Westoby denounced the ongoing loss of tropical forests and the failure of forest policies and practice to provide for social needs (1987:241–54). His speech and the declaration adopted at the end of the congress gave legitimacy, if not substance, to the contention that excluding local people from the forest and from the planning and implementation of management programs does not work. Forest resources are critical to the survival and vitality of neighboring communities, and managers would have to take account of broader social interests in the forest resource if forests were to survive.

At this time, the term social forestry emerged in India to describe programs supported by the Indian Forestry Department to plant trees on hillsides, roadsides, and other so-called wastelands in order to provide a range of forest products of importance to neighboring communities (Ballabh and Singh 1988; Pankaj-Khullar 1992; Romm 1982). The concept of social forestry evolved to encompass a range of management strategies in many developing countries, which considered social functions of forests in addition to timber and other commercial products (Poffenberger 1990). Within a decade, social forestry itself was criticized as being too state-directed, excluding local participants from decision-making, and not addressing conflicts on existing forested lands. During the 1980s in West Bengal, some district forest officers began to experiment with partnerships involving village committees in formulating and implementing management plans to regenerate degraded forests and monitoring forest users. In return for their participation, communities received a share of income from timber and other forest products. The success of their efforts demonstrated the potential for joint management of forests, and the model began to spread to other states. In 1988 the Indian Forestry Department adopted joint forest management (JFM) as a national policy, marking perhaps the first time that communities formally and legally reclaimed at least some of the rights of access to forests that they had lost in the course of the creation of a national forest estate (Poffenberger and C. Singh 1996).

Interest in reconfiguring the relations between state natural resource administrations and forest communities has been widespread and in no way limited to the developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The proliferation of experiments, policies, and projects has generated a varied terminology as it has been applied to different geographical regions, to different ecosystems, and to a changing understanding of the complexity of relations between individuals, communities, society, and natural resources. Community management, co-management, participatory forestry, forest stewardship, collaborative management, community-based conservation, and others have been added to an ever richer—and sometimes confusing—lexicon to describe a vision of resource management in which resource-dependent people are recognized as having a stake in the condition of the natural resource. From a focus on forests, the concept has broadened in scope to include water and wetlands, fisheries, wildlife, and pasture under the term community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) (perhaps the most inclusive term).

While it may not be desirable to draw sharp boundaries among the mosaic of different ecosystems that make up a landscape, this study will focus on forests—ecosystems dominated by trees—in rural areas, and it will use the term CBFM, recognizing that wildlife, fungi and mushrooms, water, carbon sequestration, and a wide range of other goods and services are at least as important as trees and wood in forested ecosystems. I will center the discussion on forest communities, referring to the people living in and around forests, whose lives are directly affected by the condition of the forest and by legislation, policies, and practices that control access to and use of all or part of the forest ecosystem. This working definition does not preclude consideration of the interests in forests of physically more remote actors such as timber companies or urban-based environmental groups, but it does distinguish between interests rooted in particular places, rather than interests in the forest as an economic or ecological category.

Different Interests in Forest Resources and CBFM

Communities have managed forests for centuries before the contemporary prominence of CBFM. Colonial settlements in New England set aside community woodlots to ensure a supply of timber and fuelwood. Clans in prerevolutionary rural China managed forests for construction timber and to generate income for schools and clan welfare. Long-established systems such as these tell of the resilience and ecological viability of carefully crafted community